Holley Bishop "Robbing the Bees"

"Robbing the Bees: A biography of honey, the sweet liquid gold that seduced the world"

“Robbing the Bees” divides its pages between a modern day bee-keeping operation in Florida and a world history of bee-keeping.

In apiculturalist Smiley, Holley Bishop seems to have found the perfect guide into the world of commercial bee-keeping. A competent businessman who is also deeply entranced with his charges and finds that the best part of the job is the constant learning experience.

Accompanying the season of tupelo honey, the book is as close to a documentary as you can find on the written page. From the first tentative blossoms, the placing of the hives in the fields, until the sales calls, the reader gets a complete tour of contemporary honey gathering. There is also a quick tour of a truly gigantic honey venture where bee-keepers send excess production that gets used into cereals, candy and the like.

Along the way, Bishop presents a history of apiculture from Stone Age to our days. It was very interesting to learn that the hive, as we know it is actually a recent invention (XIX century) and that for the most, our experience of honey gathering was dangerous, even life-threatening (as it still is in some regions).

There are tales of scrumptious recipes using honey (the ancient Greeks were particular fans), honey used as currency in various civilizations, a chapter on that mind blogging substance that is wax and the many uses it was put to. My favorite was probably the chapter on the medicinal (and cosmetic) uses of honey.

And yet, great as this book was, it seems to have let me far from satisfied as far as honeybees go. This is not in the least “Robbing the Bees” fault – but the more I read about these mysterious insects, the more my curiosity stirs. Bishop’s book left me hungry for more, which is a recommendation by any account.

Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum "A World Without Bees"

Just what is up with the vanishing honeybees?

The mysterious ailment with the X-files worthy name of “Colony Collapse Disorder” has scientists stumped since the spring of 2007 when American bee-keepers opened their hives to find a whole lot of nothing. Pretty soon European bees were disappearing too.

“A World Without Bees” is a fascinating, if unsettling book, which for some reason, I really didn’t get into when I first got it, a couple of years back.

I opened it again recently and became enthralled – sometimes you have to pick up a book at the right moment, I guess.

Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum have put together a very readable, detailed and interesting overview of CCD, that is also an exposé of modern agricultural practices and our very civilization’s dependence on bees.

Think I’m exaggerating? Well, consider that bees are responsible for pollinating something like 70% of crops: everything from most fruits and vegetables to cotton, needed for clothing manufacture, and coffee, not to mention most crops used as animal feed. No more bees = no more steak, milk, etc. Scary, hum?

In “A World Without Bees” several usual suspects are carefully looked over: monoculture techniques of growing crops, the massive transport of beehives to sites, viruses old and new, pesticides, climate change.

Even if scientists have yet to understand the mechanisms at work in the mysterious disappearance of honeybees one thing is made clear by the surprising picture painted by Benjamin and McCallum: agriculture these days is sounding more and more like a soil form of fois-gras production. We can’t expect to keep up it up without something going very wrong. For all intents and purposes it seems it already has.

A great book.